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Updated: May 6, 2025
Whether a pragmatical Presbyterian Scot should regulate the discipline of an English Parliamentarian army, and whether the Westminster Assembly should establish a Presbyterian Inquisitorship over the whole mind of England, were but forms of the same question. Little wonder, then, that Cromwell, finding himself in London on the smaller form of the business, resolved to move also in the larger.
It may have helped indirectly to strangle many things; and I should not wonder if among them was the prosecution of the business prescribed to the Committee of Printing by the Order of Aug. 26. The Accommodation Order was a demand generally for clearer air and breathing-room for everybody, more of English freedom, and less of Scottish inquisitorship.
For, though the Committee of Parliament had been instructed to inquire out the author of the Divorce Treatise, this was but a form. The second edition, dedicated to the Parliament and the Assembly, and with Milton's name to it in full, had been out more than six months. Was there to be no check to this Presbyterian inquisitorship? Whence could a check come?
Though the Presbyterian organization of London had been voted on trial, the Congregationalist principle still asserted itself in the existence of many independent congregations and meeting-houses; though sometimes interfering with the less respectable of these, Parliament and the law- courts had taken no steps for their general suppression; and, by belonging to one of them, a Londoner of peculiar opinions might have the comfort and respectability of being a church-goer like his neighbours, and yet avoid unpleasant inquisitorship.
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